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How to delete the old unavailable backup from RMAN catalog

Hi all,

I have the following setup:
9.2.0.4 Catalog
8.1.7.4 Target
8.1.7.4 RMAN used to backup the target

The problem is that I had a set of RMAN backups to disk. These test sets happen to have been deleted on the OS level. So in order to remove them, I first did a crosscheck, then made then unvailable and then tried deleting them. For some reason, the catalog does not seem to delete the entry. When I try doing some validation on the backup sets and archive log, RMAN is looking for some way older archives which no longer exists. I even tried 'delete expired backups'. So my questions are as follows:

1. How do one remove the entry? Checked the RC_BACKUP_SET and notice the entries had been marked with status "O" (Which I presume to be partially unavailable)

2. How to get rid of the old archive log information from the controlfile? ( present controlfile_record_keep_time is at default which is 7)?

As you can see on my setup description, I'm using the catalog and not the control file and has a mix environment and not 9i to 9i. There were so much differences and improvement of using 9i RMAN with respect to 8i RMAN.

1. No Errors upon doing a crosscheck or delete expired backup option
2. List backup shows the following :

If you do a "crosscheck backup completed between date1 and date2", the status should change from "unavailable" to "expired". Then, issue a "delete expired backup.." - if that's what you are trying to do.

> "This was what I got after running delete expired backup."

What did you get? It doesn't appear in your post. The next para is simply a restore validate.

Coming to pando's thoughts: The reason why I did not put the set until clause was that I want to run this validation after every level 0 backup. The successful completion of this script would give some confidence the backups are at a restorable point without needing any manual intervention on the recovery scripts.

I'm more intersted in know what could be holding those log sequence information. This database gets incrementally backed on a daily basis and the archive backups three times a day.